A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to advertising and, more particularly, to serving relevant advertisements by comparing advertisers' targeting criteria to the content of media on which the advertisements are to be published.
B. Description of Related Art
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Advertisers have used these types of media to reach a large audience with their advertisements (“ads”). To reach a more responsive audience, advertisers have used demographic studies. For example, advertisers may use broadcast events such as football games to advertise beer and action movies to a younger male audience. However, even with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted because the target audience is not interested in the ad they are receiving.
Interactive media, such as the Internet, has the potential for better targeting of advertisements. For example, some websites provide an information search functionality that is based on query keywords entered by the user seeking information. This user query can be used as an indicator of the type of information of interest to the user. By comparing the user query to a list of keywords specified by an advertiser, it is possible to provide some form of targeted advertisements to these search service users. An example of such a system is the Adwords system offered by Google, Inc.
While systems such as Adwords have provided advertisers the ability to better target ads, their effectiveness is limited to sites where a user enters a search query to indicate their topic of interest. Most web pages, however, do not offer search functionality and for these pages it is difficult for advertisers to target their ads. As a result, often, the ads on non-search pages are of little value to the viewer of the page and are therefore viewed more as an annoyance than a source of useful information. Not surprisingly, these ads typically provide the advertiser with a lower return on investment than search-based ads, which are more targeted.
It would be useful, therefore, to have methods and apparatus for providing relevant ads for situations where a document is provided to an end user, but not in response to an express indication of a topic of interest by the end user (e.g., not responsive to the end user submitting a search query).